Slashdot Mirror
Are There Any Smart E-mail Retention Policies?
An anonymous reader writes "In an age of litigation and costly discovery obligations, many organizations are embracing policies which call for the forced purging of e-mail in an attempt to limit the organization's exposure to legal risk. I work for a large organization which is about to begin destroying all e-mail older than 180 days. Normally, I would just duck the house-cleaning by archiving my own e-mail to hard-drive or a network folder, but we are a Microsoft shop and the Exchange e-mail server is configured to deny all attempts to copy data to an off-line personal folder (.PST file). The organization's policy unhelpfully recommends that 'really important' e-mails be saved as Word documents. Is anybody doing this right? What do Slashdot readers suggest for a large company that needs to balance legal risks against the daily information and communication needs of its staff?"
Destroying e-mail - something that used to be a good idea - can now be a crime even absent an active criminal investigation. For firms affected by Sarbanes-Oxley, you'd better comply with e-mail retention rules.
And for those of you libertarian-for-yourself, statist-for-big-companies types out there, this is what happens when the government pokes its nose into regulating business; they don't just make Microsoft's life miserable. All aspects of life and business will be intruded upon. That's just how Big Nanny works.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Deleting email is just fine with Sarbanes Oxley as long as you have a specified policy and follow it to the letter. It would be okay to have a policy that email is auto-deleted after 30 days, if your company wanted to do that.
What is specifically NOT okay is deleting email once an investigation is underway or if there is reason to believe you will be investigated. In those cases, you have a duty to preservce evidennce. if you delete email under these circumstances for example, the judge may instruct the jury to assume that the email was incrimating or may rule summarily against you. Either way, your company is hosed.